Keeping the peasants ignorant helps the king and his knights get wealthy and stay in power. Seems to be working. Peasants on minimum wage are less expensive and less trouble than slaves.....until they aren't. The long arc of history bends toward barbarians at the gates.
Senator Brattin is the same yahoo who last year sponsored a measure creating a new criminal offense prohibiting school librarians and teachers from disseminating “explicit sexual material” to students. Channeling U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Brattin claimed that “you know it when you see it.” Predictably, the measure sent school librarians into a tizzy. Since there was already a law barring the provision of obscene material, they wondered what the new law prohibited that the old one didn’t. The result: hundreds of books were removed from school library shelves, including "Maus: A Survivor’s Tale", a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust, and a graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale".
“Our children are a precious gift from God, and it’s our job to raise them to respect themselves and the opposite sex the way God intended,” Brattin said.
I guess you don’t need a college degree to divine the divine will.
I was never one to believe in a “They”, but I’m afraid I do now. And I believe “They” don’t want us to think, “They” want us to blindly follow what “They” tell us. How else could we wind up with a tDump?
Well, one way to end up with a trump is to put people in front of televisions and glorify celebrity and fame regardless of character. What put me over the edge this week was the "president's" remarks on Mueller. In the back of the Washington Post report, there were brief bios of Mueller and Trump. The contrast could not have been starker. After reading the report three times, including those bios, Mueller became a hero to me. After this weekend, I vowed to stay focused on defeating MAGa, and not allowing these damaged souls sap any more of my energy than they already have.
The dumbing down of America is already well underway. I can't tell you how many articles I've read over the past few years by college professors complaining that in the past decade students reading and focus skills have deteriorated to the point where they can't read a whole book. And now, with the help of AI, so many won't research and write their own papers that professors have had to figure out other means to test students' knowledge. If this is what's happening at the college level, how much worse is it among those who never make it to college? I shudder to think of the world my grandkids, now two and four, will inherit.
Michelle, I took a class in college (The Sociology of Knowledge); a 400 level class that introduced me to the concept of phenomenology.* I was so far over my head in that class when reading the book, and I am a pretty good reader, that I was taken down a peg or two. Our midterm in that class (about 12-15 IIRC) was so bad that the professor said he was going to give us an interview final, with 10 questions in a 30 minute block so he didn't have to "wade through what you thought you learned".
I ended up with a solid C in that class; my performance on the final showed the impact of the three lectures I missed in traveling for softball tournaments.
I was a criminology major, and parlayed that degree (not a requirement for employment in the department that I worked for unless I wanted to apply for an "Executive" certificate from the governing law enforcement body) into a solid 30 year career.
I shudder to think of what AI would turn out in that environment.
I just want to add that while working in retail decades ago, 1977 or so, my store's employment application had a few questions to gauge basic literacy & arithmetic mastery. Questions like "why do you want to work here", "alphabetize this list of words", along with just a few very basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division & percentage calculations. NOTHING intended to humiliate any applicant, just so we could have a baseline of confidence that this person could organize inventory, make change, and be polite & responsive to customers. MOST applicants COULD complete the one page application without being intimidated, but an alarming number of jobseekers could not meet this low bar of competency. (We also had scores of "non-applicants" who only wanted to register as "job searching" just to maintain unemployment income.)
My point is that a low-performing workforce has always been a significant presence among our citizenry, and decades of tinkering hasn't really produced any meaningful change.
I personally eked out an associate degree & a trade school diploma. Confronted with the choice to push for a BA degree (and student debt), I chose instead to take my chances in the workforce with the meager attainment I was able to squirrel away.
Much can be said about the quality of education I received & my own academic shortcomings, but I'll just say that I have more sympathy for students floundering in classrooms with indifferent teachers than I do for the bright little teachers' pets, preening for honors & recognition for their apple-cheeked superiority.
I so agree with you. I've a liberal arts education that I treasure. I read at least 30,000 pages a year in fiction, non fiction, history, economics (hate that), politics and whatever. My best friend from college, also liberal arts, is taking a course in Hawthorne's short stories. We discuss them. I've taken misc. courses over the internet including on Vikings, calligraphy etc. I've had 20 fiction and non fiction books published. I only started earning good money when I left the US permanently. I'm now Swiss Canadian. Education has been the basis for a rich life and I shudder at the ignorance of my former fellow Americans in general. I don't know if it is too late to correct the self destruction of the country.
“A college education should be more than an item of commerce to be traded on the job market. To view it solely as an economic asset is to devalue it. If that happens, it is no longer higher education, but merely vocational training. Higher education has the higher calling of educating historically literate citizens to be culturally tolerant, ethical, independent of thought yet mindful of community, and fully prepared to lead this nation in a century in which economic prosperity must be balanced with environmental sustainability and social equity.”
We need potters, writers, philosophers, accountants who can spell. Higher education brings people together from different places and perspectives. Sadly, Iowa is headed in the same direction. Farm Bureau much?
Oh man, "accountants who can spell" hits the bullseye very succinctly. These are the "soft skills" that grease the wheels of commerce & basic human interaction that are the MOST difficult to impart & for students to internalize.
What led so many Missourians -- and it's not a uniquely Missouri problem by any means -- to support candidates who (in their public pronouncements at least) could readily claim to be "ignorant and proud of it"?
Many of our lawmakers lied to constituents. They told folks to their face that they would not pull funding from public schools and they did it anyway. Also, many anti-public school Republicans run unopposed.
I wonder how much a physicist earns. I don't think much.
Yet, those scholars have created the basis of pretty much all of our modern technical achievements. If not they themselves, but also those they mentored and inspired.
The idea being spouted is that education = money = worth to society, and of course that’s completely wrong-headed. In London, an intern banker will get a Christmas bonus higher than my yearly wage at the end of my career; and my colleagues and I also worked much, much longer hours.
As Jess says, the machine is behaving as it is designed to do; but it’s a very stupid and short-term machine. They are most definitely killing the goose (geese) that laid the golden eggs.
Most of us in the global north would not know how to find or grow our own food or how to put a roof over our heads, and I think that is a huge contributor to our epidemic of poor mental health. How will it be for the rich who have completely outsourced all their ability to look after themselves, and actually know very little about anything much at all (hence their certainty about everything). Does Thiel really think anyone in the future would WANT to defrost him? Why on earth would they? People would want to resurrect Shakespeare, or the artists who made Rouen Cathedral, not the purveyors of spreadsheets and surveillance. The arts are the whole POINT of working together to produce a surplus…
If you are teaching physics, your income may be lower, but other physicists are making over $100K annually. My Dad taught physics and made enough to have a wonderful 5 bedroom house and pay for three sons to go to college and get our degrees.
Instead of a "Missouri Senate Education Committee", Missouri folks would be better off with a "Educate the Missouri Senate Committee". Gee, Jess, it seems as though you could drop the names of all Missouri legislators into a hat, pull one out, and write about something ignorant and awful that person has done, State Senator Rick Brattin being the latest example. I admire how you continue to fight against the madness in Missouri.
I agree with you and I am trying to stay positive about the future but the longer the orange jackass is in office the less hopeful I am. I will continue to do what I can to help educate those around me. We can not let our children grandchildren and great grandchildren think their future doesn't matter.
It seems that these lawmakers are trying to tell us that ignorance pays better. If that's the case, then why are so many caught in corrupt transactions in efforts to subsidize their earnings? They are demonstrating that ignorance breeds corruption.
By ever measure, a person with a college degree earns a million dollars more in a lifetime than a person with a high school degree. In addition, a person with a college degree pays--naturally--more in taxes and is more likely to start businesses and to participate in their community doing volunteer work. In addition, a degree means you are much more likely to be employed. I feel tremendously blessed to have a college degree as my life continues to be enriched as a lifelong learner.
These--and I'm going to say it--WHITE MEN that Jess is referring to are continuing a long sexist tradition of under valuing a profession when women become the primary professionals in a field like teaching. This is part of the barefoot and pregnant and keep your mouth shut spiral!
Brava! I also have a liberal arts degree and appreciate that in all educational pursuits, beautiful things come from challenging ourselves to learn and grow. We also learn and grow from the vast opportunities we have to experience different societies, information, and people (like you). And Jess, the same is true of our spiritual development, because the more we question ourselves, our beliefs, and our religious and social practices and traditions, the more we learn, grow, and change for the better (love/respect/care for your neighbor as yourself). Which means that these folks' spiritual ignorance is also on full display.
Keeping the peasants ignorant helps the king and his knights get wealthy and stay in power. Seems to be working. Peasants on minimum wage are less expensive and less trouble than slaves.....until they aren't. The long arc of history bends toward barbarians at the gates.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” -
Nelson Mandela
So of course free thinking must be abolished by fundamentalists.
Senator Brattin is the same yahoo who last year sponsored a measure creating a new criminal offense prohibiting school librarians and teachers from disseminating “explicit sexual material” to students. Channeling U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Brattin claimed that “you know it when you see it.” Predictably, the measure sent school librarians into a tizzy. Since there was already a law barring the provision of obscene material, they wondered what the new law prohibited that the old one didn’t. The result: hundreds of books were removed from school library shelves, including "Maus: A Survivor’s Tale", a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about the Holocaust, and a graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s "The Handmaid’s Tale".
“Our children are a precious gift from God, and it’s our job to raise them to respect themselves and the opposite sex the way God intended,” Brattin said.
I guess you don’t need a college degree to divine the divine will.
The dumber you are, the more you think you know what the Creator really meant. SMH!
Are all these "precious children" the result of immaculate conception?
Ughhhh...
The hypocrisy machine is alive and well, killing the future for all but the elite. Grrr 😡 Thanks for continuing to raise the alarm.
I was never one to believe in a “They”, but I’m afraid I do now. And I believe “They” don’t want us to think, “They” want us to blindly follow what “They” tell us. How else could we wind up with a tDump?
Well, one way to end up with a trump is to put people in front of televisions and glorify celebrity and fame regardless of character. What put me over the edge this week was the "president's" remarks on Mueller. In the back of the Washington Post report, there were brief bios of Mueller and Trump. The contrast could not have been starker. After reading the report three times, including those bios, Mueller became a hero to me. After this weekend, I vowed to stay focused on defeating MAGa, and not allowing these damaged souls sap any more of my energy than they already have.
Agree 100%
The dumbing down of America is already well underway. I can't tell you how many articles I've read over the past few years by college professors complaining that in the past decade students reading and focus skills have deteriorated to the point where they can't read a whole book. And now, with the help of AI, so many won't research and write their own papers that professors have had to figure out other means to test students' knowledge. If this is what's happening at the college level, how much worse is it among those who never make it to college? I shudder to think of the world my grandkids, now two and four, will inherit.
Michelle, I took a class in college (The Sociology of Knowledge); a 400 level class that introduced me to the concept of phenomenology.* I was so far over my head in that class when reading the book, and I am a pretty good reader, that I was taken down a peg or two. Our midterm in that class (about 12-15 IIRC) was so bad that the professor said he was going to give us an interview final, with 10 questions in a 30 minute block so he didn't have to "wade through what you thought you learned".
I ended up with a solid C in that class; my performance on the final showed the impact of the three lectures I missed in traveling for softball tournaments.
I was a criminology major, and parlayed that degree (not a requirement for employment in the department that I worked for unless I wanted to apply for an "Executive" certificate from the governing law enforcement body) into a solid 30 year career.
I shudder to think of what AI would turn out in that environment.
I just want to add that while working in retail decades ago, 1977 or so, my store's employment application had a few questions to gauge basic literacy & arithmetic mastery. Questions like "why do you want to work here", "alphabetize this list of words", along with just a few very basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division & percentage calculations. NOTHING intended to humiliate any applicant, just so we could have a baseline of confidence that this person could organize inventory, make change, and be polite & responsive to customers. MOST applicants COULD complete the one page application without being intimidated, but an alarming number of jobseekers could not meet this low bar of competency. (We also had scores of "non-applicants" who only wanted to register as "job searching" just to maintain unemployment income.)
My point is that a low-performing workforce has always been a significant presence among our citizenry, and decades of tinkering hasn't really produced any meaningful change.
I personally eked out an associate degree & a trade school diploma. Confronted with the choice to push for a BA degree (and student debt), I chose instead to take my chances in the workforce with the meager attainment I was able to squirrel away.
Much can be said about the quality of education I received & my own academic shortcomings, but I'll just say that I have more sympathy for students floundering in classrooms with indifferent teachers than I do for the bright little teachers' pets, preening for honors & recognition for their apple-cheeked superiority.
I so agree with you. I've a liberal arts education that I treasure. I read at least 30,000 pages a year in fiction, non fiction, history, economics (hate that), politics and whatever. My best friend from college, also liberal arts, is taking a course in Hawthorne's short stories. We discuss them. I've taken misc. courses over the internet including on Vikings, calligraphy etc. I've had 20 fiction and non fiction books published. I only started earning good money when I left the US permanently. I'm now Swiss Canadian. Education has been the basis for a rich life and I shudder at the ignorance of my former fellow Americans in general. I don't know if it is too late to correct the self destruction of the country.
From Zell Miller the former governor of Georgia.
“A college education should be more than an item of commerce to be traded on the job market. To view it solely as an economic asset is to devalue it. If that happens, it is no longer higher education, but merely vocational training. Higher education has the higher calling of educating historically literate citizens to be culturally tolerant, ethical, independent of thought yet mindful of community, and fully prepared to lead this nation in a century in which economic prosperity must be balanced with environmental sustainability and social equity.”
We need potters, writers, philosophers, accountants who can spell. Higher education brings people together from different places and perspectives. Sadly, Iowa is headed in the same direction. Farm Bureau much?
Oh man, "accountants who can spell" hits the bullseye very succinctly. These are the "soft skills" that grease the wheels of commerce & basic human interaction that are the MOST difficult to impart & for students to internalize.
So well analyzed and well articulated. Thank you.
What led so many Missourians -- and it's not a uniquely Missouri problem by any means -- to support candidates who (in their public pronouncements at least) could readily claim to be "ignorant and proud of it"?
Many of our lawmakers lied to constituents. They told folks to their face that they would not pull funding from public schools and they did it anyway. Also, many anti-public school Republicans run unopposed.
I wonder how much a physicist earns. I don't think much.
Yet, those scholars have created the basis of pretty much all of our modern technical achievements. If not they themselves, but also those they mentored and inspired.
I’m a physicist, and you are SPOT ON!
The idea being spouted is that education = money = worth to society, and of course that’s completely wrong-headed. In London, an intern banker will get a Christmas bonus higher than my yearly wage at the end of my career; and my colleagues and I also worked much, much longer hours.
As Jess says, the machine is behaving as it is designed to do; but it’s a very stupid and short-term machine. They are most definitely killing the goose (geese) that laid the golden eggs.
Most of us in the global north would not know how to find or grow our own food or how to put a roof over our heads, and I think that is a huge contributor to our epidemic of poor mental health. How will it be for the rich who have completely outsourced all their ability to look after themselves, and actually know very little about anything much at all (hence their certainty about everything). Does Thiel really think anyone in the future would WANT to defrost him? Why on earth would they? People would want to resurrect Shakespeare, or the artists who made Rouen Cathedral, not the purveyors of spreadsheets and surveillance. The arts are the whole POINT of working together to produce a surplus…
Wonderful Robyn ,
Stop killing the golden geese!
“The morality of a country can be measured by what they spend their money on.” (?)
If you are teaching physics, your income may be lower, but other physicists are making over $100K annually. My Dad taught physics and made enough to have a wonderful 5 bedroom house and pay for three sons to go to college and get our degrees.
Instead of a "Missouri Senate Education Committee", Missouri folks would be better off with a "Educate the Missouri Senate Committee". Gee, Jess, it seems as though you could drop the names of all Missouri legislators into a hat, pull one out, and write about something ignorant and awful that person has done, State Senator Rick Brattin being the latest example. I admire how you continue to fight against the madness in Missouri.
I agree with you and I am trying to stay positive about the future but the longer the orange jackass is in office the less hopeful I am. I will continue to do what I can to help educate those around me. We can not let our children grandchildren and great grandchildren think their future doesn't matter.
It seems that these lawmakers are trying to tell us that ignorance pays better. If that's the case, then why are so many caught in corrupt transactions in efforts to subsidize their earnings? They are demonstrating that ignorance breeds corruption.
By ever measure, a person with a college degree earns a million dollars more in a lifetime than a person with a high school degree. In addition, a person with a college degree pays--naturally--more in taxes and is more likely to start businesses and to participate in their community doing volunteer work. In addition, a degree means you are much more likely to be employed. I feel tremendously blessed to have a college degree as my life continues to be enriched as a lifelong learner.
These--and I'm going to say it--WHITE MEN that Jess is referring to are continuing a long sexist tradition of under valuing a profession when women become the primary professionals in a field like teaching. This is part of the barefoot and pregnant and keep your mouth shut spiral!
Brava! I also have a liberal arts degree and appreciate that in all educational pursuits, beautiful things come from challenging ourselves to learn and grow. We also learn and grow from the vast opportunities we have to experience different societies, information, and people (like you). And Jess, the same is true of our spiritual development, because the more we question ourselves, our beliefs, and our religious and social practices and traditions, the more we learn, grow, and change for the better (love/respect/care for your neighbor as yourself). Which means that these folks' spiritual ignorance is also on full display.